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October 25, 2007
Diller Adds New Title
That sweetheart, Barry Diller, CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp., added another title to his long list of monikers this week. His new title is King of Hypocrites, which can be added to Toughest Boss (FORTUNE magazine) and Most Overpaid Executive (Over $240 million last year).
At a Forbes conference in Beverly Hills, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “Diller said that when it comes to the disruptive power of the Internet, incumbent media companies still ‘don't get it,’ with the possible exception of News Corp. His advice to media executives is to build new things online from scratch, and he praised Time Warner for doing just that in the form of TMZ.com.” For the uninitiated, TMZ is a wildly popular celebrity gossip site on AOL.
Diller advising media companies to build new things online from scratch is like Mel Karmazin advising his managers to be sweet, kind, and extravagant. IAC owns 60 brands, all of which it bought to cobble together a warmed-over bouillabaisse of websites: Ask.com (formerly AskJeeves.com), CitySearch.com, CollegeHumor.com, Evite.com, Gifts.com, Home Shopping Network, LendingTree.com, Match.com, and Ticketmaster.com, to name a few.
IAC has developed nothing new, to my knowledge, so his advice to incumbent media companies, based on his reign at IAC, should have been, “You’re not structured to be innovative, so buy whatever websites you can at bargain prices, see if you can sell advertising on them at low prices, pay yourself a lot of money before anyone catches on that you’re not a good executive or strategic thinker, and give speeches so people will think you know what you’re talking about. Then, you might be able to take over the title of King of Hypocrites.”
Don’t worry, Barry, your title is safe for a while.
Posted by Charles Warner at October 25, 2007 12:35 PM
Comments
Media Curmudgeon ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mediacurmudgeon.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 25, 2007 08:41 PM writes:
Jesse - Your comments are on target, of course. I didn't say that Diller was dumb, just hypocritical for telling incumbant media companies to be innovative when he's not. He's smarter than NBCU about Web stuff, but that's not saying much.
Jesse Kornbluth at October 25, 2007 06:47 PM writes:
Shall we compare Diller with Steve Case?
Case had Love@AOL and a community for every interest. Instead of building out on the Internet, Case bought a "hard asset" (TimeWarner), dumped Love and (surely unknowingly) presided over the decimation of community. (As early as 1998, I was at a meeting in which biz types talking of killing Jewish Singles, an area with 70,000 young Jews. These singles paid $23 a month to use AOL, but they didn't "generate revenue". Thus, they were undesirable. I had to explain it's not good to piss 70,000 Jews off. Or 70,000 of any kind of member.)
Diller, in contrast, had the good sense to buy a quality site in most important categories. He's the big-ticket Nick Denton. Maybe that's not visionary, but in a business that has NBC/Universal paying $650 million for a shell like iVillage, that ain't exactly dumb.
Media Curmudgeon at October 25, 2007 06:10 PM writes:
OK, I stand corrected. IAC did create two killer, highly innovative websites, Gifts.com and 236.com. Here is the what 236.com writes about itself on its site within The Huffington Post:
"236.com is a co-production between the gigantic, vaguely Death Star-like "new media holdings company" IAC/InterActiveCorp, and The Huffington Post, a progressive news hub where outraged people go in order to get more outraged before going to have dinner at Balthazar.
To put it another way, IAC is the quarterback, and The Huffington Post is the point guard.
Okay, we don't actually play or watch any sports. Let's try again...
IAC is the charming, alcoholic father. The Huffington Post is the co-dependent child.
That came out wrong."
I'll bet you can't wait to go to Diller's home-grown site now.
Media Curmudgeon at October 25, 2007 06:05 PM writes:
A friend wrote:
"Ouch. IAC did hire Michael Jackson to head up programming and they have home-grown sites like gifts.com and 236.com."
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